Evenfall
by Melfice
Summary: Now that you live in my chest, anywhere we sit is a mountaintop. (Movie!verse, Thorin x Bilbo)


**Evenfall**

There is wind through branches and foliage that sounds like a song he ceased listening to long ago, when the melody began to resemble a memory he couldn't forget. There is a chill in the rock and stone underneath his palms, under his legs and though leather and cloth, which feels like a distant home he can scarcely bear to remember. A heart beats in the chest of the body leaning into his side, lungs rising slowly with even breath, and if there is a luxury more foreign to him than the warmth against his side then he could not say what it might be.

There could be a hundred mornings and a hundred nights between here and there. There could be a thousand heavy footfalls from lowest field to highest peak, a thousand more than even that, and his journey would feel endless regardless; the length no longer matters. He has been walking the straight and narrow of a path he knows intimately, as though it is a path he laid himself into dirt and stone, for the entirety of his life. What is another peak to climb? What is another river to cross? There will be blood at his feet before there is finely crafted stone. There will be the smell of copper before there is the smell of sulfur, of gold and ash.

Thorin wakes often in the night to a phantom warmth against his face, like the lick of flame from an unkempt fire; he wakes often to the feeling of flesh running from bone like water, to the scorch of hair and cloth and the screams – the screams – the screams. Thorin wakes every night to another unfamiliar sky, another unfamiliar campfire, and an uncountable amount of distance between his feet and the mountain he can think of only as home.

Under the haze of evening Thorin does not sleep, will not for the remainder of the night, but he listens to the steady breathing from the halfling at his side, listens to the laughter and singing from his shield brothers around the campfire, and he feels as at peace as he is able. There are leaps and bounds in differences between dwarves and hobbits, but Thorin is finding them more difficult to count over the passing days. He once wanted to say the differences were in courage, in valor, in strength, but he can say none of these things now without a troubled mind and a heavy, guilty heart. He keeps his mistakes close to his chest so as to never make them again and if he has made one so egregious as to discount this halfling then he knows not what it might be.

One thing he can say with certainty, of the differences between the two of them, is that hobbits do not suffer pride as do the dwarves. Thorin knows he is proud, knows that it can make him difficult to reason with and impossible to discourage, but he can no more change the course of the setting sun than he can change who he is. His pride can make him vulnerable – can make him weak – but it has never crippled him so severely as the moment he casts a glance down to where Bilbo sleeps against him, head against his shoulder, and thinks, _Is this fear?_

Pride has no place in the heart; they cannot live in harmony together. Pride is a cage with iron locks, squandering more than protecting, and it is a blindfold over eyes that wish only to see they are not alone. Thorin's pride says he has been brought to his knees by someone half his size, by no one, and that he is being rent in two by doubt and fear, fear, fear. He is afraid for the state this halfling leaves him in, for the way it feels as though he is being pulled in two different directions by two entirely different desires that cannot coincide. He is afraid for the doubt in his heart that makes him question his path, his actions, himself.

Thorin is a dwarf of action, not of words. He is no scholar, nor is he well versed in the inner workings of his own heart, but he has never felt the absence before. Never before has he looked inwards and found himself wishing for answers to questions that should be inconsequential, that should be entirely irrelevant; never has he found himself frozen in place, cursed to inaction, from the kind heart of another. He will fell legions to reclaim his home, to reclaim his birthright, but there is the thought in the back of his mind that he would fell multitudes more if it meant no harm would come to the smallest of them.

_Camaraderie_, he thinks to himself, as the last remnants of dusk slip down the horizon, but he does not stop counting the inhale – exhale – of breath next to him. He does not think of the fear that had clutched his heart, of the cold dread that had resided in his spine, when he had thought to never hear such a simple, rhythmic sound again. He does not think on the beating of his own heart, does not ponder on whether or not the shape of it has – impossibly – changed. He does not dwell on the feeling in his bones, like a bough bending in the fury of a storm, and he does not – will not – imagine that it could come from the weight against his side.

_Coward_, he thinks, but is too proud to say it aloud.

-/-

Sleep is difficult to come by in strange surroundings, among fellows he has only just begun to become familiar with, and it is difficult still when what little he gets is plagued by dreams. Bilbo sleeps when he can, when there is time, but even when awake there is a cloying fear in the back of his mind that is as pervasive in daylight as it is while he rests. He fears many things, not least of all the rejection of the dwarves in his company, but perhaps nothing so much as he fears the slow crawl of time.

Time, more than anything, is a curtain over him that he cannot brush aside. Time is the difference between his actions and his inactions, between the movement in his limbs and the static fear that holds him in place. There had been nothing but the fast ticking of a clock in his mind, amidst flame and blades, when Thorin had fallen; the ticking of time, like the beating metronome of a heart, and in Bilbo's dreams he takes too much time – far too much time. In his dreams there is a cacophony of brutish laughter, of the sickening sever of bone from flesh, and there is the clock ticking louder and louder, _you're late, you're late_.

At the start of his journey Bilbo dreamt of his own death, garish and horrific, night after night. These nights he dreams of living, of being the last one left, and he often wakes empty and hollow and cold. The same could be said of every night, but there are a few when he falls asleep with a heavy, comforting hand on his shoulder – a prince's contemplative thoughts louder than any singing or snoring – and these nights he sleeps soundly, safely. Their days all begin before dawn and some of his days begin with the smell of leather and pine, with a soreness in his neck that comes from sleeping at such a strange angle for a night.

The first time he coughs into his palm and says, a little awkwardly, _"Well, that was, uh, unexpected. I don't suppose you could have woken me? No, I suppose not."_

The second he reasons, _"It is cold out. I don't know where my gloves have gotten off to."_

The third is the first he notices Thorin does not sleep as often as he. The third is the first he wakes to find eyes on him, troubled and confused, and Bilbo decides that it may just be better not to draw attention to it. He knows there is guilt and burden that stays Thorin's tongue, even as he can see there are words that should be said. Bilbo does not wish to revisit the subjects that they have closed doors on, the ones that make Thorin's gaze faraway and full of regret; Thorin's heart is heavy enough.

"_It is all right, you know_," he says one evening, with the warmth of the fire against his face, _"It's perfectly fine to, well, care about someone else. Perfectly normal._"

He thinks Thorin too stubborn, too proud, to acknowledge it, but he says it regardless. It may just be a trick of the light, of the shadows across his face, but Bilbo thinks he sees the hint of a smile.

"_Don't you worry,_" Bilbo assures him, in a faux whisper. _"Not a word from me. I swear to secrecy."_


End file.
